4,321 miles in 64 days (59 on the bike). I originally planned
to take a rest day every week or 10 days but after the first
one at the Virginia/Kentucky border I realized I didn't really
need -- or even want -- them. The next time I got off the bike
was in Jackson, Wyoming, where I rented a car and drove around
Yellowstone National Park for four days.

A hair under 75. (4321/59 = 73+ miles/day.) When I was planning
the trip I figured to ride about that much -- it's a respectable
distance that's easy to make once you're in decent shape, but
which leaves lots of time for visiting, touristing or just wasting
time. Of course overnight spots aren't always 75 miles apart,
plus on some days you just feel like riding more or riding less,
so it was the rare day when I actually rode 75 miles. Generally,
I was comfortable between about 65 and 100 miles.

I wanted to ride ocean-to-ocean and decided to start at Bethany
Beach, Delaware, because it's about as close as the Atlantic
gets to my home in Washington, DC. Originally I intended to ride
to San Francisco -- I really liked the idea of finishing in the
shadow of the Golden Gate -- but getting to northern California
meant crossing hundreds of miles of literally empty land in Nevada
and I wasn't sure how much fun that would be. Robert
Beckman (who made my panniers) suggested that I would enjoy
riding to the ocean near Portland and so that's what I decided
to do. The middle part was easy -- I just followed Adventure
Cycling's Transamerica Trail, which runs right through the
heart of the continent. (Adventure Cycling has also mapped northern
and southern routes but the middle route made the most sense
given the time of year I'd be riding.) Steven Ciccarelli, an
avid cyclist in the DC area and an extremely helpful fellow,
suggested routes from Bethany to the Transamerica Trail near
Charlottesville, Virginia. (Check out Steve's cycling site at
http://cyberider.us.net/bikes/.)
Bob Beckman got me from Jackson, Wyoming, to Portland.

The Adventure Cycling maps are great but they cover only about
5 miles on either side of the route. As part of some deal with
the U.S. Department of Transportation, every state in the U.S.
offers free state highway maps; those were useful for helping
me figure where I was in the state, as well as for occasional
off-route excursions. Tourist centers and Chambers of Commerce
usually had them, but stores and hotels sometimes stocked them
as well. It paid to ask, because they weren't always on display.

Although for most of the trip I was following predetermined
routes, I did improvise from time to time and was generally successful
at it. If (when!) I do this again I might take a more ad hoc
approach -- it's not as hard as it seems.

For a map and more detailed information about the route, see
the Route page.

Yes, due partly to a short lead time and partly to my own
temperament. It is common to advertise in cycling magazines or
on the internet for long-distance riding companions, but usually
several months in advance. I didn't know for sure that I could
go on my April trip until February and by the time I got to looking,
potential partners either weren't able to clear their schedules
or had already made incompatible plans. (My mid-April departure
date was unmovable as well as a little early to set out.) As
it happens, however, I usually travel by myself and so when no
partner emerged I was quite content to go forward. And then --
almost predictably -- 10 or so days into the trip I met up with
another cross-country cyclist, Rob, and we rode together for
almost three weeks (from Kentucky through Colorado). Finally,
toward the end of the trip I rode for a few days with an English
couple, John & Gloria, who'd been riding on their tandem
for a year. There are advantages to both solo and accompanied
riding, and I was lucky to find a good mix.

I rode a made-for-touring bike manufactured by Bruce
Gordon in Petaluma, California. Broadly, I carried with me
a couple changes of on-bike and off-bike clothes, camping equipment
(e.g. tent, sleeping bag, stove, toothbrush), some tools and
spare parts, and a few non-essentials like a camera and a book.
The loaded bike weighed 97 pounds the day I left Washington,
DC. I whittled that down a bit over time.

Hotels about 2/3 of the time. The remainder, I slept in campsites,
city parks, hostels or on someone's living room floor. Indeed
there are dozens, even scores of people along the Transamerica
Trail who have made second careers out of feeding and sheltering
touring cyclists. Some are listed in cycling books or on the
Adventure Cycling maps themselves; you might also learn of them
from riders you meet along the way. But you may meet up with
them even if you're not looking -- some of these folks are so
aggressively generous that more than once I was approached by
people who offered to put me up for the night if I didn't already
have a place to go.

I ate in a lot of restaurants, diners mostly. Some days I
bought ingredients in the morning and constructed lunch out of
them later. Between meals I stopped at convenience or grocery
stores.

It took a week or so to realize that at a tourer's long, steady
and low-intensity pace, I didn't need to confine myself to the
high-carb, low-fat items that cyclists claim to prefer when riding
hard and fast on their road bikes. After that blessed revelation,
I ate whatever I wanted and indeed for several days in Kentucky
subsisted nicely on milk and moon pies.

I always had something with me on the bike, if only an emergency
Snickers bar wedged between the tent and sleeping bag. Fig Newtons
and their spinoffs (Strawberry Newtons, Raspberry Newtons, etc.),
bananas and apples were favorite between-town fuels. I always
had three or four packages of Ramen noodles or Lipton "Pasta
& Noodle" side dishes to boil up on those nights I was
camping some distance from a place to eat.

You eat a lot when you're bike touring and it was not
uncommon for Rob & me to go into a restaurant, order something
like their "Hungry Mother" dinner and then follow it
up with another entrée and then dessert. The need to keep
ourselves fueled meant that when we were stocking up on food
we would reject certain otherwise appealing items on the ground
that they contained too few calories. It was an amusing (and
welcome!) inversion of normal dietetic habits.

I kept track! As for lodging -- in 64 days on the road (including
four nights in and around Jackson, Wyoming, when I was touring
Yellowstone National Park by car), I spent 36 nights in hotels,
for a total of $1522. That works out to an average hotel bill
of about $42.25. I spent ten nights at paid campsites or in hostels
and paid $93 total for those. (Cheaper!) The remaining 18 nights,
I slept for free in city parks, folks' basements and in various
other places that presented themselves. The total may sound a
bit pricey but I wasn't making any serious effort to contain
costs, and a person could reduce lodging expenses dramatically
from mine. After all, there are very few nights when you really
need to stay in a hotel.

I spent about $1800 on food. You are hungry all of the time,
always, and I tried to keep at least two or three things to eat
in my pocket or somewhere on the bike. Indeed I spent a lot of
time in grocery and convenience stores looking for high-calorie,
portable stuff. Occasionally I would buy raw materials and prepare
something later, but for the most part actual meals were in restaurants.
You could probably do better than $1800 by shading further toward
groceries instead of restaurants (and by cutting out two or three
pretty fancy meals Rob and I took). It is hard, though, to eliminate
restaurants altogether. There's not always a grocery store handy
when it's time for lunch, and though you can eat more cheaply
by buying materials for two or three meals in advance, that can
be a pain. Grocery store food is bulky, and when you're already
loaded down with luggage you're not eager, or sometimes really
able, to carry a full day's or more worth of food.

Otherwise. I spent maybe $60 on ferry tolls, laundry, showers
and incidental items like chapstick, advil and sunscreen. In
the course of the trip I mailed home several packages containing
things like exposed film, stuff I found didn't need, or had purchased
and didn't want to carry -- that totalled about $90. Other expenses:
$150 on bike maintenance and parts, and cold weather clothing
I didn't pack but wound up needing. Film, $75. Admission to museums
and other tourist attractions, $30. Postcards, gifts, souvenirs
were $200 -- which could be zero if you wanted it to be.

I paid for things with a combination of cash, credit cards
and traveller's checks. There were many ATMs along the route
and a few times instead of cashing a traveller's check I would
replenish my cash from them. They were certainly handy, but there
was no telling in advance where they might be, and I would advise
against relying on them as your source of spending money.

Finally. Watch your phone bill! I charged a lot of
calls back home and wound up paying about $500 for the privilege.
But I didn't have to pay that 'til I got back.

Well, first -- there were probably only four or five days
when it rained hard for more than an hour. But to answer the
question, you keep riding. It may sound unpleasant, but riding
in the rain isn't bad at all. Oh, it can be a bother, stopping
to put on a rain jacket and cover up the panniers, keeping your
eyeglasses clear -- but getting and being wet really isn't a
problem or even that uncomfortable so long as you're warm. In
fact keeping a comfortable temperature is probably the most exasperating
part of rain riding. Uphill and working, you get hot and unzip
your jacket. But you have to zip it up quick on the downhill
or chill in a hurry. It was no problem in flat country, but in
rolling terrain zipping and unzipping every couple hundred yards
got old pretty fast.

It snowed for a couple of hours one day in Colorado but Rob
and I were dressed quite warmly and I actually preferred it to
rain.

Secondary roads, i.e., those less traveled by cars. In one
or two places in the east the only available or sensible routing
involved a few miles on an unpleasant busy divided highway. Those
instances were rare, however, and were more an esthetic offense
than a safety problem. (They usually had pretty good shoulders.)
In the west one's route choices are limited -- there might literally
be only three or four ways across a state -- and I spent a lot
of time on U.S. highways like Routes 20 and 26 in Idaho and Oregon.
I even had to ride about 15 miles on I-80 in Wyoming. But even
those roads were not too cluttered with cars and on the occasions
when they did get a little congested, there was almost always
a decent shoulder to retreat to.

I think that some of the roads are more crowded toward mid-summer
(especially in the east) and so others riding this route may
report a bit more concern about traffic.

Every few days I encountered an uncomfortably bumpy stretch
of road but generally road surfaces throughout the U.S. were
good, certainly better than what I'm used to cycling around DC.

Almost unfailingly with patience and respect. I figure I was
passed by tens of thousands of cars, and yet I can probably still
count the overtly hostile acts on my fingers and toes. (Oddly,
most of the unpleasant encounters were concentrated in a 20 mile
stretch either side of Farmington, Missouri.) I think drivers
regard a loaded touring bike more like a slow vehicle -- a skinny,
useless tractor perhaps -- than as a bicycle. The K states, Kentucky
and Kansas, were the most pleasant. In Kentucky the drivers would
drive behind me at a respectful remove up endless switchbacks,
waiting at 4-5 mph until it was unambiguously clear to pass.
Kansans overtaking Rob and me on their wide open straightaways
would move clear over to the oncoming lane even when we were
only 6 inches off the shoulder line on the right.

If I could see well up the road, I'd let the cars behind me
know when it was clear to pass. In any case I tried to acknowledge
passing cars with a wave or thumbs-up ("I know I must have
held you up and I appreciate your patience"). Drivers in
the hurry-up states of Colorado, Wyoming and Oregon passed a
lot closer than the Kansans but never dangerously so.

Yes, but not as bad as you'd expect. You just gear down, slow
down and sooner or later you get to the top. The route passed
through three ranges -- the Appalachians (about a week), the
northern edge of the Ozarks in Missouri (a day -- pfft), and
the Rockies (10 days / two weeks). It's hard to draw direct comparisons
but the Appalachians really were the hardest, even though their
high point on the route -- about 3,700 feet -- was nothing compared
to the 7,000 - 11,000 foot elevations of the Rockies. I think
it's mostly because of the different way roads are cut through
the two ranges. Appalachian roads tend to be twisty, steep, switchbacked
things, while the roads in the Rockies are built within certain
grade specifications and so present much straighter and more
gradual ascents. Indeed you can gain thousands of feet in the
Rockies without going near your lowest gears. Also the Appalachians
were a lot crueler, in that as soon as you crested a peak you'd
often descend back almost to the level at which you'd been an
hour earlier. There just wasn't much relief from the climbing.

The hardest part about the Rocky Mountains was the thin air.
Surprisingly, it wasn't hard to keep up a middling pace for hours
even at 8,000 - 9,000 feet, but as soon as I asked my legs to
do the littlest extra bit -- like get all the way around Rob
so a car could pass -- they'd turn straight to rubber, not a
bit of strength in them. Of course right about the time I adjusted
to the altitude, the mountains ended.

I thought it would make a better adventure to be a little
deeper into distant territory, a little further from home, every
day. By travelling west I would be following history, "discovering"
new places in the same order that the early settlers and pioneers
did. Also, though I had my destination pretty well decided, I
liked the idea of an open endpoint: when you're riding toward
home you pretty much know where you have to end up, but until
I made my plane reservations out of Portland I could finish wherever
I wanted. Then finally, and perhaps most importantly, when I
rode from Boston
to DC in 1995, I found myself unpleasantly impatient to finish
in the last couple of days as I began riding through familiar
home territory. I wanted this adventure to continue to
the very last minute.

No. This was a real-life FAQ, although it was usually delivered as an SPOF (Statement of Patently Obvious Fact). In the middle of the country, most of the wind comes from the south and benefits neither the eastbounder nor the westbounder. Toward the coasts the wind does tend to come more from a westerly direction but it seemed silly to change the entire direction of the trip to make easier riding out of three or four windy days I could expect to encounter in the 8-10 days I'd actually be near the coasts. I can now report from experience that the wind was distinctly hostile perhaps 25% of the time, beneficial 15-20% and not much of a factor the rest. (Even then some of the worst days were in Colorado, when I was headed north, not west.) I wouldn't hesitate to ride the route east to west again.

This prevailing winds perception is so well entrenched that after a while I stopped trying to contradict it and simply told people that riding east to west was the manly way and that anyone who rode eastbound was really sort of cheating.

I flew, using the front half of a round-trip Portland-to-DC ticket that I'd purchased by telephone somewhere in Wyoming. (I still have the return half lying around somewhere.)

As for the bike  I didn't feel like boxing it up, schlepping it to the airport, paying a fat supplemental luggage fee, and then having to reverse the entire clumsy process at the other end, so it travelled separately. I'd had a couple of days to kill in Portland, and without much trouble I was able to find a bike shop that, for a small fee, would pack the bike up securely in a standard cardboard bike box and then place a call to FedEx. On the morning of my flight home, I delivered the bike to the store and handed over $25 for the packing plus a FedEx label addressed to me care of my local bike store back home (this by pre-arrangement). Shipping (using FedEx slowest option) was something like $100. I had to get a FedEx account so the bike store could hand off the bike without my being there, but that was trivial. The bike arrived back east a few days later, safe & sound.

My luggage was a bigger challenge. On a bike, the weight of the four panniers and handlebar bag is nicely distributed, and all they reliably travel in the same direction. Once separated from their racks, however, they're unwieldy and each one tends to take on a mind of its own. Add a tent, sleeping bag and helmet to this already unmanageable pile, and you've got a substantial logistical challenge. I spent the better part of one morning wandering Portland alleys until I found a cardboard box large and strong enough to hold the 60 or 70 pounds of stuff I'd hauled with me to Oregon. Once I had it loaded, I mummified the thing with a roll of packing tape and sent it through as my checked luggage.

P.S: I'd heard that it was illegal to transport camp stove liquid gas canisters by commercial air once they'd been used, even totally empty and even stowed in checked luggage. Something about mere fumes posing a danger. I "solved" this problem by rinsing my canister repeatedly and then filling it with water -- no room for fumes any more! This defeated whatever mechanism they were using in 1997 for detecting flammable cargo, and my contraband made it home no problem. I am guessing, though, that things would not be so easy in the post-9/11 era, and if confronted with the same dilemma today I would probably just donate the canister to a camping goods store.

No. I locked my bike during the day fewer than 10 times, those
being in larger towns (e.g. Pueblo, Portland) or when I was going
to be well away from it for more than half an hour or so (e.g.
at Natural Bridge or some other tourist spot). When I was in
restaurants or grocery stores I just didn't bother, figuring
that a grimy, lived-on touring bike isn't something anyone would
want to touch, let alone steal. Also at close to 100 pounds it's
not like someone can just hop on it and ride away.

When I slept outdoors I'd lock it so that if I heard a noise
during the middle of the night I wouldn't wonder if someone was
trying to walk off with it.

More generally, I didn't encounter any scary or threatening
people other than the occasional grumpy motorist. I did discover
late one Saturday night in the Springfield (Ky.) city park that
the remote corner in which I'd pitched my tent was next to the
parking lot where local kids went in order to drink, smoke and
play music on weekends. A couple of times their headlights came
to rest on the outside of my tent and I got a little nervous
but I later decided that they were just curious about the kind
of person who'd spend a chilly and wet night in a tent. In Hartville,
Missouri, Rob and I camped on the courthouse lawn; in the morning
he reported that teenagers hanging around at the convenience
store next door had kept him awake during the wee hours with
loud and nasty comments about how much they hated cyclists and
what they'd like to do to them, but I slept through it all so
I don't count it.

13.9 miles, the outskirts of Lander to Lander, Wyoming. I'd
met several nice people at the campsite and got a late start,
I was falling ahead of schedule again, and Lander was too charming
to blow through. I was not too worn out by the previous
day's ride!